QWERTY describes the keyboard layout of English-language keyboards, based on the 1874 typewriter. It takes its name from the first six characters of the keyboard’s top row of letters. The basic layout was designed by Christopher Latham Sholes for the Sholes-Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington. It was said to be designed to minimise typebar clashes and remains in use on computer keyboards. It is illogical, random, and based on what I think was a left-handed ex-publisher-cum-inventor who could not solve the jamming of keys. Because it was the first successful mechanical writing machine, its key layout became the standard.
Sholes was the 52nd person to invent the typewriter but the first to call it that. He struggled for six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original device’s alphabetical key arrangement to reduce typebar clashes. He used a study of letter-pair frequency by educator Amos Densmore, brother of his financial backer, James Densmore. Typebars corresponding to letters in commonly occurring alphabetical pairs, such as S and T, were placed on opposite sides on the keyboard.
He arrived at a four-row, uppercase keyboard close to the modern QWERTY standard. In 1873, Sholes’ backer sold manufacturing rights for the Sholes-Glidden ‘Type Writer’ to E Remington and Sons, and within a few months the keyboard layout was finalised by Remington’s mechanics.
Remington’s adjustments created a keyboard that is essentially the modern layout. They placed the ‘R’ key in the place of the full stop, thus enabling salesmen to impress customers by keying the brand name “TYPE WRITER” from one row of keys.
The QWERTY layout allows many more words to be keyed using only the left hand. In fact, thousands of English words can be keyed using only the left hand, while only a few hundred words can be typed using only the right hand. This is helpful for left-handed people. I contend that Sholes was left-handed and got even for every left-handed person who would ever live.
Typists learned the habit of using the lowercase letter L for the number 1, and the uppercase O for the zero. The exclamation point, which shares a key with the numeral 1 on modern keyboards, could be reproduced by using a three-stroke combination of an apostrophe, a backspace, and a period. The 0 key was added and standardised in its modern position early in the history of the typewriter, but the 1 and exclamation point were left off some typewriter keyboards into the 1970s.
The first machines typed only capital letters. The Remington #2 offered upper and lowercase by adding the ‘Shift’ key. It is called a shift because it actually caused the carriage to shift in position for printing either of two letters on each typebar. Electronic keyboards no longer shift mechanically when the shift key is pressed, but its name remains.
Several alternatives to QWERTY have been developed over the years, claimed by their designers and users to be more efficient, intuitive and ergonomic. Nevertheless, none has seen widespread adoption, due to the sheer dominance of available keyboards and training.
When Ottmar Mergenthaler was laying out the keys for the Linotype, he counted the pieces of type in a printer’s typecase. Thus he had a separate set for caps and lowercase arranged by letter frequency use in the English language. Thus, in a computer age, we key on an antiquated, illogical keyboard arrangement.
Frank Romano is professor emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology
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